Re: [xsl] Is XSLT the right tool for XML to SGML conversions

Subject: Re: [xsl] Is XSLT the right tool for XML to SGML conversions
From: "Liam R. E. Quin liam@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx" <xsl-list-service@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Tue, 23 Oct 2018 17:44:23 -0000
On Tue, 2018-10-23 at 15:33 +0000, Rick Quatro rick@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx
wrote:
> Hi All,
> 
>  
> 
> I am at the preliminary stage of looking at a project. The input will
> be
> authored in XML, but the output will be SGML. Is XSLT (version 2.0) a
> reasonable language for doing this? 

By and large yes, but it will depend on the SGML Declaration in the
target as it how easy it is. In particular, the XML self-closing tag
syntax, <clean-sock/>, may or may not be supported by your SGML parser.

If it isn't, you can either write yur own serialization module, e.g. in
Java or whatever host language is used by your XSLT 2 processor, or use
the text output method - or, generate SGML but with the XML syntax and
use a carefully-crafted Perl or Python script (for example) to tweak
the output.

Note that XSLT is a declarative language and this can take a little
getting used to if you come from an imperative programming background
(e.g. you can't "assign a new value to a variable"). If it's a large
project and the conversion will be ongoing, you might want to invest in
an XSLT course.

There's plenty of people on and around this list who can help you.

Liam


-- 
Liam Quin, https://www.holoweb.net/liam/cv/
Available for XML/Document/Information Architecture/
XSL/XQuery/Web/Text Processing/A11Y consulting & training.
Web slave for vintage clipart http://www.fromoldbooks.org/

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